Here the Sentence Will Be Respected
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Abstract
This paper explores embodiment in documentary poetics as a corrective to the homogenizing lens of "lyric poetry" that works to erase, by making abstract, non-standard (non-white) bodies. In particular, it examines the performative aspects of punctuation, line breaks, and stanza patterns in Layli Long Soldier's book Whereas, written in response to the 2009 United States Congress joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States. The paper contextualizes the apology and poem within Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The significance of the frontier in American History,” eighteenth and nineteenth-century "dead-Indian" poems, and theories of lyric reading. Layli Long Soldier's Whereas joins other acts of poetic resistance, such as Martha Collins' White Papers, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, and Phillis Wheatley's "On Recollection."
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References
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